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Democracy's a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it's no longer democracy, is it? It's something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.
Sam Shepard -
I'm not denying that it's exciting to have a play on Broadway.
Sam Shepard
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More than anything, falling in love causes a certain female thing in a man to manifest, oddly enough.
Sam Shepard -
Careers don't interest me. The only thing that interests me is continuing to be a poet on one level or another, whether acting or writing or directing.
Sam Shepard -
Guys like Clyde McPhatter used to sing their tail ends off!
Sam Shepard -
Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not the head. It moves us into an area of mystery.
Sam Shepard -
I never thought about having a daughter, and then I had a daughter, and it was a remarkable thing. It was very different from having a son and your response to it. With a son, it's much more complex. And it's probably because of my stuff in the past. With a daughter, I was surprised at how simple it is.
Sam Shepard -
I have a cellphone, but I have no Google, I have no gaggle.
Sam Shepard
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I never considered myself a movie star, and I didn't want to become a movie star, because as soon as you do, you throw away that possibility of playing character. You really do. All of a sudden you're just an entity, you know?
Sam Shepard -
I find the whole situation of confronting an audience terrifying.
Sam Shepard -
You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.
Sam Shepard -
It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty - and all the rest of it.
Sam Shepard -
I don't believe in a lot of schmoozing and buttering up. Not that you don't become friends in work. But I think it's a misconception that you have to do a lot of hanging before you work.
Sam Shepard -
Grief is bizarre territory because there's no predicting how long it'll take to get over certain things. You just don't know how long it's going to resound in your life.
Sam Shepard
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I'm a great believer in chaos. I don't believe that you start with a formula and then you fulfill the formula. Chaos is a much better instigator, because we live in chaos - we don't live in a rigorous form.
Sam Shepard -
When I first started in film, I was terrified of the camera.
Sam Shepard -
It's my private life, and it's not up for grabs.
Sam Shepard -
Sometimes in someone's gestures you can notice how a parent is somehow inhabiting that person without there being any awareness of that. Sometimes you can look at your hand and see your father.
Sam Shepard -
My dad was a kind of semiprofessional Dixieland-type drummer, and I learned the drums from him. When I was about twelve, we bought our first Ludwig drum set from a pawnshop - a marching-band bass drum, great big tom-toms, and big, deep snare drums.
Sam Shepard -
I don't get offered leading parts. I suppose I've become a kind of character actor or sideman. I think it had to do with probably in the '90s, I refused so many leading roles that they gave up on me, or I just became unpopular, or I became old. All those reasons.
Sam Shepard
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I'm not put off so much by first-time directors if the script is great. If the script isn't there, I'm not there.
Sam Shepard -
I've come to feel that if I can't make something happen in under an hour and a half, it's not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play.
Sam Shepard -
Dialogue is like jazz. Dialogue is creative.
Sam Shepard -
I've been into horses as far back as I can remember. There is a particular kind here in America called the 'quarter horse' that I'm very interested in.
Sam Shepard